October 1955, New Zealand. Nineteen-year old Albert Black is in Auckland jail. Johnny McBride is dead, killed by a single stab wound to the neck following an incident in Ye Olde Barn cafe, and Albert, also known as Paddy, is on trial for his life. Fiona Kidman’s This Mortal Boy reanimates what became known as the jukebox killer case and it seems the right time to do it, to push human ambiguity in the face of authoritarian certitudes.
It’s the aftermath of the 1954 Mazengarb Report into the moral delinquency of young, post-war adolescents getting out from under the puritan deadweight of their parents’ generation. The police are seizing and burning morally suspect books. For the most part the parents are sad and uncomprehending while the authorities are zealous and vengeful.
Kidman's prose is precise, detailed, lyric
Black has come on a £10 emigrant passage from Belfast – he’s charming and handsome and the girls in the milk bars like him and some of the country club wives like him as well. Four or five women a week, he says when asked. The official gaze is disapproving and prurient. The whole country is in a moral panic, the youth cults are “bodgies” and “widgies”, the boys in silk shirts and quiffs, the girls in Whirl bras and matador pants.
You wouldn’t know what sparks are struck in flinty official minds, vice ignited. The carnal norm has it seems gone beyond petting to below-the-waist action and it is time to intervene before the country goes to the dogs. It’s not the atmosphere for an immigrant boy from Belfast to find himself on a murder charge.
There’s a history between the two men: McBride had beaten Black in a row over a girl the night before. Black wants to play Slim Whitman’s Danny Boy on the jukebox and McBride keeps overriding his choice. The actual stabbing never seems in focus, as if unwitnessed, Black’s intention uncertain, his own recall fogged. There is something of Camus’s L’Etranger in the killing but less existentialist – an event blurred with social conflict, loneliness and desire. The victim is himself adrift, another immigrant, troubled and uprooted. One young man with a given nickname, the other having, it turns out, adopted a name from a book, as though in the uncertainly of their world their own given names have become slippery, not to be relied on.
There are strange synchronicities. Black’s emigrant passage from Belfast isn’t the only link between the two countries running through the case. The stabbing victim’s real name is Alan Jacques, the pseudonym Johnny McBride adopted from the amnesiac antihero of Micky Spillane’s 1951 pulp novel The Long Wait. The same book will be a prosecution exhibit in the trial of Robert McGladdery for the murder of Pearl Gamble in Newry six years later.
It may be giving too much to Spillane’s punkish, snarling prose to say that the book was a factor in the alleged crimes of both men. The links are more in psychic undertow than in motivational force but the social and political infrastructure of the two cases are close.
Anti-Irishness is a major component in the case against Black, and the jury isn’t immune to it. Black is “not one of ours”. Not that Black’s fate is entirely dictated by prejudice and moral outrage, but his options are fatally narrowed. Kidman puts us in the jury room, the heat on for the recalcitrant. If self-interest and the desired outcome don’t coincide then they can be made to, blame subtly shifted from the individual to the system. There’s only one way out of this jury room.
In the middle of all this a girl sits quietly at the back of the courtroom. She’s Paddy Black’s future if he gets to see it. Bessie’s the first girl he has got serious with, and her involvement with Black brings a freight of regret that seems too much for her young life to bear. In Belfast, Black’s parents wait in dread. His mother collects donations to travel but the New Zealand authorities know the weight that a grief-stricken mother throws into the scales and they conspire against her trip.
Kidman’s prose is precise, detailed, lyric. The naked Bessie in bed beside Black is a “pale, flung star”. She knows what to take out and what to leave in, the innate forensics of good writing turning up all the right things in the research, the facts, the giveaway phrasings, the oratory, picking out QC Richard Bennington’s invocation of the tenderness of youth as he points out the young man on the stand, Paddy Black, “this mortal boy”. As the news from New Zealand gets worse, the hangman’s Meccano set taking shape, Black’s parents sing Will You Go Lassie Go to each other, animating their loss and confusion with the unexpected, the detail fixing the whole.
Kidman has campaigned for Black's conviction to be overturned and the death sentence is in her sights as well, but there's no proselytising here. The fluencies and hard-won command of a good writer bring out their own truth. In the end there is only good writing and bad writing, things standing for themselves and nothing else. That should be enough.
Eoin McNamee's latest novel is The Vogue. Orchid Blue (2010) was inspired by the case of Pearl Gamble and Robert McGladdery
